Goats in Space: Blog

Update: Art gallery is finally up!

Kris — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 08:56:00 +0000

I finally got around to doing a light redesign and adding a functional art gallery. The gallery's theme doesn't match up perfectly with my site, but in my search for gallery software, I found out there were almost no galleries that would match up easily with an existing CSS stylesheet. All of them are covered with tables!

I got the gallery to look pretty nice anyhow. Check it out. I'll probably still be tinkering with it here and there over the next few weeks, but at least it's working and looking like it belongs with my site.

Colorado Pit Bull Rescue Shirts

Kris — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:00:00 +0000

I've recently been working on some designs for the Colorado Pit Bull Rescue Cafepress store. Check 'em out!

Changing Hosts

Kris — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 22:36:00 +0000

Due to persistent problems with my last host, hosting for Goats in Space has switched to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Their prices are reasonable and much of their service is automated, eliminating some of the problems I had with my previous host. Hopefully I'll be able to get SQL-dependent stuff up and running again soon!

(Confidentially, I am hoping to do another redesign/reorganization soon, so I might hold off on finishing the gallery until then.)

Technical Difficulties

Kris — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 05:34:00 +0000

There have been some technical difficulties with the gallery of late. I've had very, very little time to investigate them, but they have something to do with MySQL (which I admit having very little familiarity with). I'm not sure if the error is a fault on the server side or within my art gallery application files. Either way, the gallery is currently inaccessible. I'll give you good folks an update when it's back up and running.

Until then, my DeviantART site is the best place to go for my artwork.

Job

Kris — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:51:00 +0000

Well, I got a job pretty promptly upon moving, and since then I haven't found myself with much drive or motivation to do anything creative outside of work. It's a software engineering job, but it's not drudgery -- it's pretty exhausting brain work. I like it, but man, if it doesn't tire me out by the end of the day.

My co-workers are all nice and I don't have any complaints about anyone. We're coming down on a deadline, though, so I suspect I'll be a little stressed in the coming week.

Now Broadcasting from Boulder, Colorado!

Kris — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:27:00 +0000

Sorry, I moved across the country while no one was looking! I posted a little more about it at my personal blog.

We were trying to meet a deadline on getting there (Monday night -- we made it!), so I didn't really have a chance to stop and sketch or take photos. That was actually incredibly disappointing. I was hoping to have lots of interesting pictures to share with you fine folks once I got here.

Oh well, you'll just have to take my word for it that Nebraska is flat and Iowa is boring. Not even the time of year when the cornfields start looking pretty.

Maybe I'll have a little time to go around town and sketch now that I'm here, though. Keep an eye out!

Update: Commissions

Kris — Wed, 09 May 2007 07:42:00 +0000

I've thrown up a rough draft of the commission information page. I expect to make quite a few changes to it over the next few weeks (it honestly sounds a little too stuffy to me). I just wanted to get this sort of information out there for people who were interested.

It's honestly a rather new policy for me. I used to have a set of flat fees for certain kinds of pictures, but in the long run I was working for much longer than I should have for the amount I was getting paid. I never knew how to charge people who wanted to use the work for profit, either. Having a set of licenses will probably help with that.

I'm still trying to refine this, so feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

Update: About the Artist

Kris — Mon, 07 May 2007 18:41:00 +0000

Over the last couple days, I've taken the time to revamp my personal information page and add a resume for potential employers (both permanent software engineering types and temporary freelance art types). I'm looking for both types of employment at the moment, and I will certainly continue doing freelance art even after I acquire a permanent job.

I'll be adding information for art commissions to my art page soon.

Graduation

Kris — Fri, 04 May 2007 01:41:00 +0000

Last weekend I finally graduated from the University of Michigan. It seems like it wasn't so long ago that I just enrolled here, went to orientation, explored campus for the first time. It's just wild that here I am, four years later, with a few extra initials and a righteous sunburn that's just starting to peel.

At the end of the month I'll be moving to Boulder, Colorado, to stay with my boyfriend. That should be an interesting drive: three days across the plains, right down the middle of Tornado Alley. I'll be sure to load my camera.

Update: Art and Merchandise

Kris — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 18:11:00 +0000

Hey, folks. I'm taking a break from the wild world of final exams to let you know that I finished uploading all the old art I had available to the Gallery section. One of my personal favorites is the new Che Guevara dolphin picture that I did as a back cover for the latest Gargoyle Magazine.

I've had a couple people asking me about t-shirts of that design, so I added them to my Zazzle Store. I know the preview looks funky and pixellated on Zazzle, but the design that I provided to them is very high resolution and the whites in it will print completely transparent. If you'd like a shirt, please don't be put off by Zazzle's computer generated preview.

If you buy one, please e-mail a photo of you or a friend wearing it to me at kjacque@boxbe.com. I'll post any photos I get here in the blog.

Update: Functional Art Gallery Ahoy!

Kris — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:47:00 +0000

Hey, folks. Just letting you know that my gallery here is finally online. Sorry that the layout doesn't yet match the rest of the site. For now I'm using the default template just to have the darn thing functional while I look for a template that's easier to edit to fit my CSS layout.

I'll be adding more art (old and new) as time goes on. For now, feel free to explore and enjoy what's there.

My Favorite Disney Movie

Kris — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 02:24:00 +0000

By far, my number one favorite is Dumbo. Today Thad K of Animation ID posted one of my favorite scenes from the movie:

When I See an Elephant Fly
Uploaded by thadk

By the way, check out the rest of Thad's blog. He posts clips from classic cartoons and identifies which animators did which scenes. You'll be pleasantly surprised when you start recognizing the little differences between the animators' styles yourself!

Update: New Design!

Kris — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 21:18:00 +0000

So I finally had a few hours free enough to give me a chance to overhaul the site. I realize it was a little clunky before, but now it's all fancy and sleek! Basically the entire design is in CSS now, so if I need to tweak the layout later, it'll be a lot easier.

What provoked the new design was partially my plan to install an art gallery management system called 4images, which looks like it will make updating here a lot easier. My web host needs to get a MySQL database set up for that, and then it will probably be pretty simple to get the gallery here up and running. Not quite sure when that will get done, but I'll post here when it is.

1937 - Disney Animators & the Rotoscope

Kris — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 18:52:00 +0000

Through a post at Mark Mayerson's blog, I found this set of transcripts from a Disney "action analysis" class in 1937. It's kind of interesting that they had special classes for analyzing action in the first place (although it's not that surprising considering the business they were in), but what's more interesting is how much Don Graham disapproves of rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping almost invariably produces boring, uninteresting results, it's true. Think about Disney's Snow White and Cinderella, both of which are arguably saved from being unbearably dull by secondary characters (the dwarfs and the mice, respectively). Then there are pictures like Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels that, in spite of lively-looking secondary characters and initial box office success, have nearly been forgotten altogether.

The use of the rotoscope is visiting us again in the form of motion capture technology: basically, rotoscope for 3D digital animation. Some of this year's animated hits, Monster House and Happy Feet, used it extensively. I didn't see Happy Feet, but I know Monster House suffered a lot of the flaws and artifacts that show up in rotoscoped footage: weird, unnatural-looking movements or expressions, and movements that seem too small, puppeteered rather than "acted" by the characters. Some of the life of the human characters is lost in translation somewhere with mo-cap, just as it was with rotoscope. Consequently, the house itself is the real star of Monster House.

It's not that I don't like these motion captured or rotoscoped movies. I did like Monster House (but felt it could have been significantly improved by having it done in live action with practical special effects instead of computer graphics), and I enjoy the old Disney features that employed rotoscope. I just think they could have all been improved by using different methods.

Frankly, I can only think of a couple good examples of the use of rotoscope. One of them was in this summer's A Scanner Darkly, where it was just used to enhance the appearance of live action recording and add some special effects that would have been difficult to pull off without the footage looking like drawings.

The other is this 1933 Betty Boop cartoon by Fleischer Studios, "Snow White." It was back when they were still very experimental. Rotoscoping is used to recreate the motion of Cab Calloway in Koko the Clown's singing sequence, but notice that the animators mix it with lots of crazy, surreal animation of things that could never happen in real life.

There are a few other Fleischer cartoons that involve rotoscoping of Cab Calloway, but the rotoscoping itself in those cartoons doesn't look as good as it does in Betty Boop's "Snow White."

Game Trouble

Kris — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 22:18:00 +0000

Apparently the Fox in the Henhouse game is not running on some computers that it should be able to run on. I am trying to figure out the problem and will let you know once I find what it is.

I suspect it's either some kind of dependency in Microsoft Visual Studio (the IDE I used to create the game) or it wants the screen size to be larger than 1024x768. If the latter is the case, I may mess with the game a little so that its screen size is slightly smaller, but I won't have time for that right away.

I'm really sorry, folks. Please be patient.

What I've Been Up To

Kris — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 07:50:00 +0000

I suppose you've all been wondering where I've been and why in Heaven's name I haven't uploaded all the stuff I promised to. The answer is that I have been extremely busy at University--projects and homework left and right--but thankfully, I have a couple things to show for it.

I'm in a video game design course, so I've made a couple of computer games so far this year. I have one more coming that will be totally awesome, but you won't get to see that until December. But the others I posted to the Projects page for your enjoyment. Please pardon me if they're amateurish. After all, they're my first real games.

Want to Learn to Draw Like an Animator?

Kris — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:13:00 +0000

Then you should take part in the $10,000 Animation Drawing Course! Using resources from Preston Blair's famous animation books, animation great John K and historian Stephen Worth lead you through the basics of animation drawing and character design.

As both of them say, anyone who can't draw as well as Preston Blair can benefit from these lessons. This means you (and me, too!). Now that I'm in a place with a free scanner, I can work on these. If any of my friends or fans do some of these lessons, I'd like them to drop me a line at krishva at gmail dot com and show me their progress. I'll be uploading some of my attempts here.

Oh, don't worry. I'll be posting the rest of my old art (and some new!) to the gallery very soon.

Big Basic Update

Kris — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 07:57:00 +0000

I just uploaded a bunch of old stuff to my art page. It will take a while to upload all the older material, seeing as I honestly don't know how to automate the process of page/thumbnail creation for my pictures.

Welcome!

Kris — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:15:00 +0000

It's been a very long time since I've had a functional website. I'll be slowly uploading old artwork for a while before adding new artwork, writing, or anything else of interest to people who have already seen quite enough of my older artwork, which is posted just about everywhere on the Internet.

I'll be documenting uploads here, but I may also discuss or post links to other things I find interesting. I'll try to keep it art-related though, I promise.